Puppy, Turkeys, Feed, Oh My!

Meet Padfoot, our 8-week-old Newfoundland puppy. He’s smart and sweet (most of the time). We found him through Petfinder.com after a friend said to check there. I had expressed my concern to her that I doubted the Shelter would accept our pre-adopt – they had a three-page questionnaire and I wondered if they would even accept us after filling it out. That same night my friend sent us the Petfinder.com link, we looked on the site, found Padfoot – same price as a adopting from the shelter – emailed the owners because guess where they were located? Very near where I went to pick up the turkey feed! The owners emailed us back Wednesday morning, I called and we set up a time to meet at the feed supply store. That was God ordained, if anything was! Very thankful for how God leads. Truly amazing, that we got a puppy all because of a questionnaire, a friend’s help and no local organic turkey feed to be found.

Thanks to Padfoot’s previous owners he is potty trained and can “shake”. He is the perfect fit for us because he was raised on a farm around goats and chickens. His father is a Golden Retriever and his mother is a Newfoundland that his previous owners paid $1100 for! Yikes! We are trying to train Padfoot our property boundaries, to walk on a leash and not to nip/bite our fingers and clothing. He still naps a lot during the day and has been pretty good at staying on our patio even when we are not out there. My husband commented on that tonight and we are hoping that Padfoot is being trained to stay on the patio while we are inside…that might be wishful thinking though.

The children have been incredibly helpful with the puppy. They have taken the majority of responsibility of taking care of him. They came up with the idea of rotating who picks up dog poop, who walks him, who feeds him, who sleeps in the garage at night. We have been very impressed. The owners of the home we are renting gave us their dog house, but it is in the barn and we have to get it out, so the garage is Padfoot’s home at night time for now. We aren’t allowed inside pets and that’s ok with us.

And yes, those familiar with Harry Potter, the puppy is named after the character in the movie/books. We finally let our older girls watch/read the series. Surprisingly, they have learned a lot from it. Not wizardry or witchcraft either, contrary to what many Christians believe about the series.

Turkeys

We got a call from the Post Office at 6:30am on Friday saying our 15 turkeys had arrived. My husband had already left for work, thankfully only 20 minutes into his 50-60 minute drive. He came back and helped me finish up the box for the turkeys’ home, then he was off. One of the older girls and I finished up and everyone helped introduce the little guys (and gals) to water and their feed. Unfortunately one turkey was dead on arrival, but so far we’ve only lost the one.

Turkeys are really stupid. They walk over sleeping turkeys and they get stuck in their feeder. But our children love watching them and holding/petting them. They will make some tasty meals in the fall.

We have a pile of feed in our garage and had to pick up puppy food tonight, as the previous owner generously gave us 3-days worth.
Puppy, Turkeys, Feed, Oh My!

FAMILY TASK LIST MASTER (I found this by Googling “Chore Charts” or something like that. I just customized it with our family tasks.)

Contrary to my frazzled post early in the week bemoaning, “Puppy, Turkeys, Feed, Oh My!” my calm has returned. I have created a family task list so we can streamline tasks and everyone can see and check off what they have done. I still have to come up with a more thorough farm task list, but this is a start so everyone knows what needs to be done and who is to do it. We’ve kind of been just assigning things as we go along and I am hoping this will keep us organized and get everything done that needs to be done. The beauty of it all is that it isn’t just me doing all of this. Our whole family is involved and everyone down to the youngest, though our 2-year old is still not capable of doing much, he can fetch things, take things to the garbage etc. Things appropriate to his understanding and age.

We are excited and thankful for our start to farm life with critters.

All photos are mine. I was too lazy to watermark them! And in the words of my daughter, please do not steal them! If those that steal photos even read blog posts!

(3) This ENTIRE paragraph made me laugh, which I desperately needed today: “Turkeys are really stupid. They walk over sleeping turkeys and they get stuck in their feeder. But our children love watching them and holding/petting them. They will make some tasty meals in the fall”

Yeah, we think he’s cute too. The thing is (in our biased opinion) he should be cute when he’s grown up too!

Thanks, baby poults….I never remember (just learned the proper term in the last month!) and I like baby turkeys better so everyone knows what I am talking about! lol! Yeah they are scrawy. Glad you gotta laugh when you needed it!

Thanks, Brande! Btw, he likes those dog treats you were suppose to get. At least that was a good thing that came out of those being sent to me instead of you and that we even had a dog to feed them too! lol!

Yeah, my mother-in-law told my husband a story that his aunt (her sister) had told her – Aunt D. had friends who had turkeys and they’d stand looking up at the rain and drown.

They are skittish when I put the phone in their box to take pictures but curious when my daughter sticks her finger in a crack of the box. They are messy too.

We wanted a large dog. With three teenagers that was the number one thing our girls were looking for in a dog as they want a protector and want the dog to deter any unwanted attention from the male population!